Guest Editorial

BY LAWRENCE SELLIN, PHD. | JANUARY 15, 2014

Un-transforming America

I always considered Barack Obama an empty suit, a coffeehouse communist, doomed to replay the tragic political and economic mistakes of the past because he lacked any sense of history beyond the clichés of fashionable and comfortable college Marxism.

Like the characters in his autobiography "Dreams from My Father" written by unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, Obama is a composite, the manifestation of a liberal fantasy, a man who, like his acolytes, exists in a political "Twilight Zone" somewhere between reality and narcissism.

Obama's political talent is based on his mastery of the platitude; a banal or meaningless statement, generally directed at soothing the social, emotional, or cognitive unease of uninformed, easily misled voters or desperate liberals in search of a Messiah. His ascension to the Presidency can largely be attributed to a combination of corruption and cowardice.

Since 2008, pressured by a biased, left-leaning media, a spineless Republican Party leadership joined the Democrats in refusing to vet Obama in violation of the Constitution and common sense. Out of fear or complicity, a conspiracy of silence has descended upon the public discourse regarding all questions related to Obama's background and fitness for office. Despite the enormous historical and Constitutional implications, the politicians and the media not only have remained silent, but have actively suppressed legitimate inquiry.

When the truth is eventually told, the chronicles of the Obama years will represent the most sordid in American history.

Having been granted immunity from any uncomfortable questions about his personal history, Obama has established lying as an instrument of government policy e.g. Fast and Furious, Benghazi, IRS, NSA and Obamacare. He has also attempted to render Congress powerless by unlawfully assuming executive authority not granted under the Constitution in order to continue, unobstructed, his fundamental transformation of the United States.

Left unimpeded, the inevitable result of Obama's policies will be a dystopia, characterized by a cataclysmic decline of society, in which a totalitarian government enforces ruthless egalitarianism by suppressing or denouncing ability and accomplishment, or even competence, as forms of inequality. Obama aims to create dependency on the state and will continue efforts to prevent the family from reestablishing itself as America's primary social institution.

Like "Nineteen Eighty-Four," Obama's dystopia will be a world of perpetual crisis, omnipresent government surveillance, misinformation and manipulation by state-controlled media; all governed by a privileged and oppressive political elite led by a quasi-divine party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality and considers personal liberty as a source of unhappiness.

In his article, "Why Americans Are Not Taught History," Christopher Hitchens identified the vulnerability of America's present-tense culture to the utopian myth.

That is, for the truly blissed-out and vacant servitude required by the Obama strategy, you need an otherwise sophisticated society to lose any sense of its own history and traditions. Using media deception and historical revisionism, the low-information voter will slouch toward Obama's utopia by a combination of governmental coercion as in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and the hedonist nihilism of a painless, amusement-sodden consensus managed by the nanny-state found in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World."

In the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Neil Postman notes that in "Nineteen Eighty-Four," people are controlled by inflicting pain; in "Brave New World," they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture. Obama plans to do both.

Ultimately, when the government is ruled by individuals unconstrained by law, there are few things that power cannot do. It can make political allies rich or paupers of political enemies. It can waste billions of dollars without accountability and destroy an economy without responsibility. It can make incompetent men high officials or make extraordinary men corpses.

The accumulation of excessive power in the federal government transforms it into a dysfunctional super-state dedicated to maintaining its own power irrespective of truth or the well-being of the country. The bureaucrats can ignore both morality and the lessons of history, in order to protect their appetite for and the use of raw power. Under such circumstances, the government need not fear that any of its agencies will intervene on behalf of the people, nor will it hear any protests from their elected representatives, nor anything but polite questions from the national media.

We now have a government and media of perfidious men and women, who are willing to risk the survival of the country rather than risk the truth.

There is a Cold Civil War underway in the U.S. to determine who should control the federal government. It is not a contest between the Democrat and Republican ideologies, but a battle between the entrenched power of the bipartisan political establishment versus the rights and liberties of the American people.

Representative and responsible government will not return to America simply by removing Obama. It will only be restored when Americans feel empowered by their political institutions, not misled or oppressed by them.

Rather than serve the country, many in the federal government have succumbed to political expediency and avarice, thereby perpetuating an atmosphere of permanent corruption in Washington, D.C. Clearly, those who are a fundamental part of the problem can no longer be considered as potential participants in a solution.

Ordinary Americans must now take a stand against the political-media elite to restore the Constitution and the rule of law, to establish political and fiscal sanity and to return the government to the people.

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. (lawrence.sellin@gmail.com)